


Ring of Keys and Other Stories I: First Impressions (Ring of Keys)

by seaofolives



Series: Ring of Keys and Other Stories [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, POV Chirrut Îmwe, Pre-Canon, Pre-Rogue One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 10:03:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10717233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaofolives/pseuds/seaofolives
Summary: Set in the younger days of Baze Malbus and Chirrut Imwe, when growth spurts were all the rage.





	Ring of Keys and Other Stories I: First Impressions (Ring of Keys)

**Author's Note:**

> _Ring of Keys_ is a song from the musical _Fun Home_.

Sometimes, Chirrut didn’t know why he even bothered to put up with his friends in the first place. Here they were, in the grand library of the Temple of the Kyber, a vast storage of knowledge reaching far beyond the system that they knew—and what were they doing? 

“Holy…look at the size of that thing!”

“It can’t grow that big, can it?”

Looking at penis pictures. 

“Well, maybe for an aqualish, it can’t,” Dama, one of his human friends, snickered. 

In retaliation to this accusation, the aqualish Omi rose and batted Dama right on his shaven head. His two other friends, Kar and Lin the duros, threw themselves to their fullest heights in response and came between Dama and Omi before they caused any damages that could not be excused as a training accident. At any other time, Chirrut might have risen to help. 

He wasn’t in the mood for it just now, though. For one, unlike his friends, he still hadn’t quite reached his growth spurt which would put him at quite a disadvantage and for another, he still felt sour over losing the private reading time (and what little of it he could manage already!) he had pinched for himself just because he, well, had to put up with his friends.

There was a reason, after all, why he’d gone through so much trouble to come to the library unnoticed. Following his afternoon prayers, he’d rushed out like an errand boy running late to his master’s bidding, employing the best of his budding stealth skills to sneak past the Elders and the older trainees without so much as a nod of respect. This was the most daring he’d ever been in his very short life thus far, the most insolent and worthy of punishment since he started on the path to be a Guardian of the Whills, but he reminded himself that all was fair in the pursuit of knowledge and the Force. 

And knowledge, today, lied between the pages of a book called the _Manual for Desire_. Roughly translated from its original language, of course. But it meant the same thing either way: it was a textbook on courtship, marriage, copulation and maintaining the quality of life thereafter. 

This was not a kind of reading that should be exposed to boys his age without proper guidance, and he doubted he had proper access to it either way but he’d heard it said that the Force moved differently between thoughts and intentions. It glowed to celebrate the birth of a new life and darkened around a person who was about to kill. Anger burned a black fire but at peace, the Force moved smoothly like a shallow sea. Since his first lesson about the nature of the Force, Chirrut had been quizzing his Elders about what it “looked” like and what it “felt” like. 

But no one, not even the wisest of them all, had been able to tell him how the Force moved when one was in love. 

At most, the answers he received were half-hearted simplifications—it was warm, it pulsed, it radiated—but mostly his Elders blushed, sputtered or redirected the conversation _urgently_ to his duans when asked. Such a hodgepodge grasp of love’s Force could not satisfy a serious future Guardian like Chirrut Imwe. That was when he decided to take the bantha by the horns and seek this knowledge all by himself—for who better could he entrust with such a delicate task? And where better to start but in the _Manual for Desire_? Restrictions be damned and all.

He’d managed to acquire the holocron with little difficulty as soon as he’d located it in the directory. After loading it onto the viewer, Chirrut was on his way. Deft fingers swept past blue pages reflected onto the clear crystal surface that stood atop one of the holocron terminals in the circular reading table. The drawings of a man and a woman, a human couple, was done in the old way and did not move. But flipping through them brought them to life, and the man to the woman and eventually, the both of them out of their own clothes and into various positions that seemed impossible to achieve without aide of the Force. 

Or at least that was what Chirrut thought, as he slowed down when the love story started, looking closely at the captions, at the figures, in case there was something he might miss. But all that he learned so far was where to touch a woman to please her and enhance her sexual energy, or how one should hold a “man’s stem” so as to invigorate him. Book’s words, not his. 

He didn’t know what to make of them. It was obvious that the characters were passionately in love but Chirrut could not yet see the part where the Force entered (it would be years yet before he got this joke). The couple did not pulsate, they did not radiate.

He never got much farther than that, though. Sat in the middle of the dark reading room, surrounded only by the quiet blue lights of holocrons arranged in mile-long rows and ceiling-high shelves, he became the perfect target for a surprise visit from his friends. As it turned out, it wasn’t the Abbot and the Elders he had to worry about but the wandering droids who were programmed to speak nothing but the truth. That was how he was caught quite red-handed, staring intently at a picture of a woman on her back with a man between her legs on his knees, both of them quite naked. Chirrut’s first defense against his friends’ jeers had been to tell the truth, of course, for there was nothing shameful about seeking enlightenment—but to no one’s surprise, they didn’t believe him. They were at that age where the changes in their bodies were becoming a source of great curiosity. So, rather than he let the whole thing blow up and invite the attention of the Elders, he did the one thing that was expected of him: he lied, and admitted that he was in it for the nudity and the coital action. Then they believed him.

And so there they were, arguing about penis sizes and the shape of a woman’s breasts. Supposedly, it was a benevolent act of friendship when they joined Chirrut in his “weird hobby” by selecting holocrons of their own liking but Chirrut knew better. He leaned back in his seat, arms crossed behind his head, his legs up the table while he watched his friends jab and shriek at each other, filling the dark void with their excited voices. It occurred to him then that if he didn’t do anything, this might escalate into something much worse than he could handle. 

Suddenly, his feet swung down with an echoing slam and the truest sense of purpose if they knew of any. He stood up in attention, staring across him with a look of terror and a sudden difficulty in getting his throat to work. His friends turned to him, all of their shoulders rigid like his. “A, A, A…” He tried to swallow again and this time succeeded. “A, A, Ar…Ar-Boel!”

That name was enough to invoke an immediate respite among the boys. As one, they, too, pushed back their seats to stand in attention, facing Ar-Boel. Dama went the extra mile of shielding the lewd images from their visitor with his body.

Except their visitor did not exist. What he stared at instead was the deep shadow between the rows of shelves illuminated and brimming with knowledge, each one blinking quietly, humming softly. 

The penny dropped when Chirrut made an ugly snort, wheezed as he doubled over then bent backward with a hearty laugh. Everyone else’s glee trickled after him. Everyone but Dama who burned.

“That was a mean joke, Chirrut!” he snapped in his deep voice. 

“Look at yourself,” Chirrut gasped, wagging a finger at him. “Your face shows plainly your thoughts! What would you do if Ar-Boel grows her womanly curves and you cannot command yourself?” he asked, shrugging with his hands. Then with a sigh, he wagged his finger again at the flustered boy. The rest followed suit. Sometimes, he didn’t know why he even bothered putting up with his friends but he knew it was because of this: he made them laugh and they all liked it that way. They put up with his jokes and his mischief. 

Sometimes, he just wished they put up with his ideas, too. About the Whills, about the Force, instead of just dismissing it as classroom fodder. He loved his friends and he had many of them who indulged his humor, but sometimes he had the distinct feeling they didn’t love him as much to understand that even jokesters like him had a right to serious reflections. 

The bell rang just then, a quiet and thoughtful _don_ that penetrated the thick darkness of the library. Chirrut and his friends stood still to heed its summons. 

_Don_ , it said again. 

“That’s us!” Lin realized in a panic, all but ripping their embarrassing discoveries from the holocron terminals. “Supper duty, that’s us!”

“Leave the holocrons, I’ll take care of them!” Chirrut volunteered heroically, unloading the _Manual for Desire_ himself. “You all go to the kitchen now, it would be better for us.”

“But what about you?” Kar asked, his voice regaining its childish trill in his hysteria. 

“Tell them I’m in the library. Save me a task!” This time, Chirrut could at least count on them to keep their actions a secret. 

They nodded as one and bolted.

Chirrut waited for their pattering steps to fade out completely before he gathered himself up with a sigh. Too bad, how this all turned out. He thought that by asking them to go ahead, he could bargain even just five more minutes of reading time—but who was he kidding? He had to put the holocrons back, the chairs in order… 

Even just returning the books to where they’d been taken from took him much longer than he expected—and much deeper into the library than he was familiar with. Chirrut was pretty sure that was because the scandalous volumes had led him right into the heart of the restricted area, like breadcrumbs drawing him to a trap where a council of Elders could be waiting to sentence him to a year full of chores for trespassing. At the very least. That was the nightmare. The good thing was that he’d had enough time to come up with a story for his defense and he had the size and the voice (and the face, he’d like to think) to make it convincing. Sometimes, being developmentally delayed had its perks, after all. 

He practiced it in his head, rehearsed it quietly as he slipped the last holocron into its nook. “Respected Elders,” he whispered to his phantom audience, “I beg your pardon for straying from my path. I came only to expand my knowledge of the Force and in so doing have lost my way…” Well, that was half-true. 

His task done, he hurried back away from the incriminating object, wiping the sweat off his hands on his trousers. A chime rang just then, like the shimmering bells they sometimes used in rituals which caused him to stop. It was not a sound he often heard within his usual corner of the library so he couldn’t say what it was for, or where it was from. Only that he hoped it hadn’t come to judge him for his unquenchable curiosity. Could it have come from one of the Elders? 

He waited for the next jingle to come. When it didn’t, his tiny brave feet made a bold turn and dashed for the source. He decided it was time to investigate it—if the sound was the herald of his doom, he wanted to come at it like a man than to have it as another unwelcome surprise. Everyone in NiJedha knew he’d had enough of that in a day. Quiet as a mouse, he slipped down the dark, cold aisle between the high blinking shelves, keeping a straight direction as instinct commanded. The chimes came again but this time, they didn’t ring so clearly as they had earlier, as though they’d been muffled, perhaps by a hand. There was definitely someone out there. He just didn’t know who they were, or how many they were. 

His answer lied at the end of the narrow path, opening up to an illuminated center he had never found before. More aisles of shelves branched out from it, like the petals of a flower. Dead center, aglow with rainbow lights was a replica of NiJedha, carved from crystals, sitting atop a blanketed pedestal. One of the Elders stood close to it, raising his hand to a bowing youth. 

The boy rose, and Chirrut felt his heart catch at the end of his throat. For who else could be so young, and yet be so welcomed to be peers of the Elders and the Abbot, but no other than Baze Malbus himself, the best of his class. 

This was the first time he had ever come so close to the darker-skinned boy who was only a year older than him, but he knew him from classroom gossips and voices echoing down the hall. He knew from them that Baze had reached the highest duan his age had ever achieved in history that in order to progress to the next level, he required a special instructor to guide him personally. His martial skills were impeccable and so advanced that he was now being pitted against trainees of a higher grade. And his devotion to the Force was so true, he once went a whole day without sustenance because of how deep he was in meditation.

That last one might just be a rumor. But looking at him, Chirrut could believe it. He was tall, admirably so. His back was perfectly straight, the perfect model whose inadequacies could be measured up to, but he had an easy posture with a slight drop of his shoulders that did not make him look so severe. Even his head, tilted just a little upwards, looked perfectly shaped under its closely-shaven hair, not too round but not flawed at all…

In fact, that was the thing about him: nothing was too perfect and whatever physical faults he had, Chirrut could not imagine a world where they could be called as such. If he ever had a scar, it would be because it was meant to be there, and not because he had failed to prevent it. His clothes hung properly onto his frame, not so tight that it twisted incorrectly when he bent a little to laugh with the Elder, but not so loose that one could no longer make out his broad shoulders, his trimmed shape. It was like...by being on him, his clothes gained the power to _breathe_. He was the perfect recipe, the perfect balance between all flavors.

Could he ever be like him? Small Chirrut, Skinny Chirrut with a voice that was yet to drop. Baze’s voice thrummed melodiously in his ears, full of insight, like he really knew what he was saying. He walked, and Chirrut was drawn to his movements, the way his graceful feet made it seem like the world turned because of them, that finger tracing circles in the air and his perfect head spinning with it as he recited a verse. When he wanted to learn about the Force, then he should have just looked for Baze Malbus—because _he_ radiated. _He_ pulsated with so much…spirit! And so much…knowledge and so much…life! This was the light, the enlightenment he never found in those books. Why was he even looking for it in them when they were matters of the past? They no longer lived and breathed the way Baze Malbus could. Baze Malbus! He could say that name over and over again. 

He heard the chimes again, clear as the day and there he saw it: a ring of crystal shards held in his other hand, with the jagged teeth of keys. _He_ , a boy so young, had been given those. Access to a treasure trove of lessons and wisdom.

At the end of his speech, the Elder who listened intently nodded deeply to his ideas, and Chirrut ached. 

Could he ever be like him? To have learned so much in so short a time, to be so respected, so bright in every way. He was the boy to be, the aspiration. He was…

Everything Chirrut wanted to be, and everything he was not. His simple knowledge would never match up to his mastery, his short legs would never swing like that. His clumsy hands with its stubby fingers would never be able to twirl like that. 

How embarrassing it would be to even try and come close. And yet, here was a boy he could greatly admire. A boy who showed him that even at such a young age, there was nothing wrong about being faithful. About wishing to devote more of himself to learn about the Force that surrounded them, in a way that his friends, who looked only to the physical world, could never seem to appreciate. _Baze_ could appreciate it, he bet. Baze would understand him. 

_Baze Malbus_ would understand _him_. 

Chirrut was certain of this, for he understood Baze’s passion, his commitment. For they were his own, too. If only at a slightly smaller scale, one that fit his size just right. Could they be friends, he wondered? 

Could he hear his heart saying hi? 

With another deep bow, Baze and the Elder parted as friends. As the senior Guardian disappeared to the back of the library, Baze turned and started to the opposite side of the building. Those dark, sharp eyes of his swept over the empty room, past the boy ogling at his tall presence, hidden between the shelves. He stopped to stare. 

Baze jumped back with a startled squawk, dropping his keys to his feet. Chirrut hurried out of his hiding place—he hadn’t meant to be caught in there!—in his panic, arms out in a pacifying gesture. 

“Please don’t be terrified, it’s just me!” he said in his tiny voice. “I’m Chirrut Imwe.”

Baze continued to stare at him in a way that was appropriate for an Endorian ewok who literally just came out of nowhere. 

“You’re Baze Malbus, aren’t you?”

Still frozen in time, Baze nodded carefully. 

Chirrut smiled brightly. “Well met!” he said, a little surprised by the opportunity practically laid out on his feet. This was the first time he’d ever met Baze Malbus and in an instant, he’d been taken by his aura. Now they were acquainted. Soon they could be friends! 

Baze offered a toothy smile but it looked a little too uncertain to be heartfelt. Chirrut should probably dial it down a bit. 

“Uh—” He cleared his throat and looked around for something to break the awkwardness. His eyes fell on the crystal keys and he zoomed down to pick it up, setting loose a chorus of tinkling sounds. “Here,” he said, offering them to Baze. “You dropped your keys.”

Baze looked down to find them in his tiny hands, and with a flowing swoop picked them up with his longer fingers. That the keys made no ruckus at all, just the gentle ringing of music, was testament to Baze’s discipline. Chirrut was in awe. 

He had to remind himself that it was rude to stare so he ripped his eyes from the taking hand and redirected them to Baze’s face. He was a handsome boy, or at least he was very attractive to be sure. 

…was it okay to think like that? 

He peeled his hand away from the keys. Respectfully, he stepped back, and offered a smile to Baze who watched with open-faced curiosity. “Well, then. Goodbye…then.” He wished he could tell him a joke. Leave him a souvenir to remember him by. 

But Baze inclined his head, then once again, and finally, turned to leave. 

Even his back was something to watch—the way he swayed just a little, how he carried his frame. _He_ swayed back to the safety of the shelf, a dependable friend to rest his weight on when his own strength could not be relied on. Chirrut could feel his heart beating in his chest, fanning a fire that burned in his neck, his cheeks and his ears. Once again, Baze was a myth that could only be admired from a distance. 

But he swore, in that one heartbeat their eyes had met, he felt like they were kindred spirits.


End file.
